A wireless mesh network is a communications network made up of radio nodes organized in a mesh topology. Wireless mesh networks often consist of mesh clients, mesh routers and gateways. The mesh clients may be wireless devices and the gateways may permit access to outside networks, such as the Internet. The mesh routers, meanwhile, may forward traffic between the mesh clients and the gateways. The coverage area of the radio nodes working as a single network may be called a mesh cloud. Access to the mesh cloud may be dependent on the radio nodes working in harmony with each other to create a radio network.
A mesh network may be reliable and offer redundancy. When one node can no longer operate, the rest of the nodes may still be able to communicate with each other, directly or through one or more intermediate nodes. Wireless mesh networks may be implemented with various wireless technology including 802.11, 802.16, cellular technologies or combinations of more than one type.
A wireless mesh network may be seen as a special type of wireless ad-hoc network. The mesh routers may be highly mobile and may have more resources as compared to other nodes in the network, such as the mesh clients. The mesh routers, therefore, may be used to perform more resource intensive functions. In this way, the wireless mesh network differs from an ad-hoc network in which the nodes are often constrained by resources.
In some cases, the nodes in the network are data-collection and storage devices, such as sensors. Because the sensors may be able to share the collected data, data security may be an issue. Accordingly, it may be necessary to implement systems and methods for protecting the sensor-collectable data.